A Novel Fading Amplitude Model and Performance Analysis of Diversity Combining Schemes

A novel model for channel amplitude fading is proposed. In particular, the plane waves arriving at the receiver antenna are superimposed using a vector norm. Then, the correlations of branch fading amplitudes are well-defined and the moment generating function of the diversity combining output channel amplitude can be readily obtained. Useful analytical results for performance evaluation of one-stage and two-stage diversity combining schemes are presented. Average bit error rates are efficiently evaluated using the Prony approximation method. Furthermore, it is shown that order statistics of independent random variables correspond to the problem of dividing the random variables into three subsets of unordered random variables. This observation is used to obtain general expressions for the moment generating function of sums of order statistics.